Sunday, December 25, 2005

The Island Within

A couple of weeks ago, I heard about an interesting experiment. The
researchers took some rats and divided them into two groups. Rats in both
groups were individually placed in a tank of water that had been made opaque by
adding milk, so the rats couldn't see what was in the water.

For one of the
groups, however, there was a kind of "island" in the tank: a raised section of
the bottom that was high enough that the rats could place their hind feet on
it, to get some rest from swimming. The other group was in a tank with no
island; they had no place to rest.

In a relatively short amount of
time, the "island" rats learned to swim straight for the island. The control
group, of course, just flailed wildly, trying to stay above water. Then came
the experiment's payoff: both groups of rats were individually placed in a tank
with no island, and the amount of time it took them to give up and sink beneath
the water was measured. (They were, of course, promptly rescued by the
scientists.)

The result? The "island" rats lasted almost twice as long
as the control rats, swimming frantically in search of the island they
knew must be there - an island that really only existed within them.

So, the part I find compelling is this: sometimes it's better to believe a
false good thing, than to believe a true bad one. One imagines the rats
thinking, "I know that island is here somewhere! Just a little bit more and I
can rest... just a little bit longer now..."

Of course, there are also
true good things, and false bad ones in this world. The islands within us may
be places of fear or sorrow that we constantly swim away from, even when they
never existed at all. Indeed, we so often live on these future islands we fear
or yearn for, that we scarcely notice the water we're treading in right
now.

The Content of Your Mind is the Quality of Your Life

About a year ago, my wife and I signed a contract for a roofer to
replace our house's roof, damaged by last year's hurricanes. A year and several
thousand dollars later, we still don't have our roof finished, as the job
became unprofitable for the roofer, who therefore has no incentive to finish
it. We've spent so much time worrying and stressing about this, and wondering
what we can do about it.

But just a few days ago, it occurred to me for
the first time that maybe we've been spending so much time trying to swim away
from an island of fear, that it never occurred to us the worrying is much worse
than the things we've been worrying about. We don't actually have any roof
leaks right now - that we know of, anyway. Hurricane season is over. The worst
that's likely to happen right now is that we might have to hire somebody else
and waste several thousand dollars.

Sure, that stuff's all bad,
but the worrying has been much worse, in terms of quality of life. Those
things, if they happen, will only happen the once, but our worrying has been
weekly and sometimes daily, for most of the year! In retrospect, I wish we'd
just hired someone else months ago; the quality of life improvement would've
been more than worth it.

So, for the first time, I acquired a personal
perspective on that old saw about the coward dying a thousand deaths, and the
brave man only one. It doesn't matter how hard you swim away from the island,
it still remains within you. But if you cross over the island, you'll
leave it behind you when you go. As the saying goes, you can touch a thistle
and it pricks you, but grasp it boldly and the spines crumble.

So, it's
also literally true what Bobby
McFerrin sang so many years ago:

In every life you got
some trouble, When you worry, you make it double.

Except that next it's triple, then quadruple, quintuple, and so on, each and every time you worry. And
it's an even worse ratio if the worrying is more painful than the actual
thing you're worrying about!

My spirits buoyed by this insight, I
found myself thinking... what if you could turn it around? If your life
experience can be so thoroughly overwhelmed by worry about negative things,
could you equally overwhelm it with positive ones? In other words, what is the
opposite of worry?

The Opposite of Worrying

Are you thinking about it? Wouldn't it be
cool to know what it is? Don't you wish I'd tell you? Are you looking forward
to finding out? Have you guessed it yet?

That's right: it's
anticipation. I probably wouldn't have thought of it myself, if I hadn't
been talking with my wife about Christmas presents the night before, just after
she'd been watching a "Queer Eye" episode where they helped a guy give his
fiancee a surprise wedding, of all things.

Now, I don't know
about you, but I winced as soon as I heard this concept. "Are they nuts?" I
said. "A lot of women have been looking forward to their wedding almost their
entire lives. They're going to rob her of weeks of anticipation and
obsessing over every detail." (And yes, the fiancee definitely looked like
she'd have been a lot happier with more advance notice.)

Anyway, after
that we talked briefly about Christmas presents, and I was thinking about how
my wife loves to obsess over what a present might be, which is why I usually
try to tease her a little bit ahead of Christmas or her birthday with
impossible hints and enigmatic clues that she has no chance of figuring out.
From experience, I know that she loves the anticipation far more than the
momentary enjoyment of the actual presents.

So the next day when I
thought about the worry equation, it pretty quickly came to mind that the
opposite of worry -- in content, not structure -- is anticipation. When you
anticipate a thing, you follow the exact same structure as worry: you imagine
something you think might happen, and then feel how you think you would
feel if the real thing happened.

So, whether the thing you're imagining
is good or bad, the result of doing it repeatedly is to magnify the effect of
the experience on your life, if only because of the repetition.

But
that doesn't entirely explain it, because the truth is that you're not
actually responding the way you would if the real thing happened. When real bad
things happen, we normally just get focused on fixing them. And when real good
things happen, it's quite nice, to be sure, but it's nothing like the ecstasy
or fervor of some good anticipation!

The secret, I think, is that when
we imagine the future -- whether good or bad -- we leave out a significant
amount of context. We see only the bad thing or the good thing itself,
floating like an island in the oceans of our consciousness. We don't see
ourselves fixing a problem, we just see the problem itself. We don't
look at the drawbacks or limitations of an anticipated future either, like kids
not thinking beforehand about having to clean up all the wrapping paper and
boxes on Christmas day.

Not that that's a bad thing, mind you, at least
where anticipation is concerned. I've spent too much of my life avoiding good
things in order not to have to clean up after them, metaphorically speaking.
It's just that I'm realizing now that all those people babbling about "it's the
journey, not the destination" actually have a much bigger point than I had
previously been aware of.

Small Goals Have No Power To Move Men's Hearts

You see, big goals are useful because they
give you something powerful to look forward to for a long time, not because
their momentary result is so valuable. You can work for a lifetime and never
actually achieve your goals, yet nonetheless have a wonderful life in the
process. (For example, it's unlikely that any golfer will ever shoot a perfect
game, nor any batter achieve a perfect 1.000 average, but that doesn't make
anybody quit playing golf or baseball.)

Paul Graham advises that, in
general, we should all
work on the hardest problems available to us, in the fields we believe we
can make a contribution to. I think that this is true, for no other reason than
that it's the what makes the most rational sense for improving the quality of
your spiritual and emotional life, regardless of whether you actually solve the
problem or not.

The flip side of anticipation, you see, is that it
supports involvement in what you're doing and how you live your life. It
gives you a chance to see the island and to be thoroughly invested in
your swim towards it. No mere amusement or pleasure is a substitute for
involvement, and games are only fun when they capture enough of your attention
to make you invest yourself in them this way.

Before my 2.0 upgrade, I
mostly feared such involvement, because the idea of losing always seemed worse
than the idea of not playing. And to the extent that I understood the nature of
anticipation and the idea of "the journey, not the destination", I rejected
them as a kind of cheat or self-delusion.

By now, however, it has
become clear to me that appropriate self-delusion isn't just a good idea, it's
pretty much a necessity for actually accomplishing anything! Sure, you can go
too far with it (cough George Bush cough), but what can't
you go too far with, really?

On the other hand, self-delusion is a
relative concept. The truth is that the messages our senses receive are
always subject to interpretation. What we think an event "means" is
inherently delusional, in the sense that our interpretations were never
reality to start with. Does a problem in the middle of your attempt to do
something "mean" the effort is doomed to failure? That you should try harder?
That you should think smarter? Every answer to the question of what an
event "means" is ultimately a delusion!

So, to the extent that we
assign the meanings, we control the meaning and quality of our lives, in an
emotional and spiritual sense at least. I'm not talking here about trying to
control the behavior of the universe through thought or creative manifestation
or any of that stuff; I just mean that what you think about and how you do it
will entirely determine how you feel about your life. That may in turn
cause you to do things differently, for better or worse, but that's beside the
point; your quality of life was already affected by your thoughts before
you ever acted on them!

Is Anything Really Worth Worrying About It?

It's easy to shrug this idea off; I was first
exposed to it maybe 25 years ago, when I first read Maxwell Maltz' "Psycho-Cybernetics".
But it was just intellectual knowledge, something that became part of my
consulting repertoire, not something I really connected with or lived.

But if
you can make this a part of your understanding of life now, then you can
really feel how worrying saps the life out of you piece by piece, and
you can become aware that the worrying is nearly always worse than whatever
you're worrying about. And even if it isn't to start with, it will be as soon
as you worry about it enough times! So if you can make this a part of your
experience -- not just your knowledge -- then you will be in a position to make
a very real improvement in your day-to-day quality of life.

As for me,
I'm now thinking about how I can use anticipation to make additional
improvements. The trick seems to be that you need something you really believe
will or can happen, but it doesn't necessarily need a concrete time frame to
happen in. And it's helpful if it's connected to the processes of your life, so
that you can experience at any moment a connection to that dream and believe
you're moving towards it.

Thus, the secret of successful people
everywhere is that they actually reverse the usual way of looking at
reality. Instead of considering the "real" world to be the fixed and unchanging
truth, they realize that the only place where truth is fixed is inside
us. It's only our external reality that moves from day to day, not the constant
compass of the soul. Magnetic north will jitter and shift as you move about the
globe, but true north is always in your heart.

So build as you will,
your castles in air;
as long as there's room
for an island beneath.

And although you'll still swim
through the thick and the thin,
your life's really lived
on the island within.